Pre-Master’s Mental Health Internship – San Francisco
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, with its vibrant cultural life, temperate climate, and vast array of outdoor activities, is arguably one of the best places to live in the country. Few cities can match the combination of scenic location, urban energy, cultural diversity and tolerant spirit that San Francisco offers. It is home to the SF Giants baseball team as well world-class performing arts such as the San Francisco Symphony. San Francisco is only hours away by car from the Napa Valley, Lake Tahoe, Carmel/Monterey, Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the Northern California coast. It offers endless choices for recreation and regional travel for skiing, camping, and surfing.
Kaiser Permanente has been providing health care in San Francisco and its surrounding communities since 1954. The 237-bed hospital and 8-story medical office building are located on Geary Blvd. Additionally, KP’s French campus, named because it sits on the site of the original French Hospital founded during the Gold Rush, is home to over 10 specialty departments. The medical center’s 4000 employees provide primary care to 28 percent of the city’s population and tertiary care to some of the three million Kaiser Permanente health plan members in Northern California. The patient population reflects the unique ethnic diversity in the region. There are Spanish and Chinese language care teams as well as interpreter services in many other languages.
The Kaiser San Francisco Psychiatry Department is located in the Inner Richmond district, an accessible and historic neighborhood situated midway between the downtown and expansive Ocean Beach. During lunchtime, a stroll through nearby Golden Gate Park is an irresistible lure for many of our employees seeking to recharge, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself making a detour on Clement Street, famed for a multitude of friendly, unpretentious, and delicious multiethnic eateries along the way!
Program Curriculum
Equity, Inclusion & Diversity
We are committed to nurturing and integrating diversity training into all aspects of our training program by:
Providing interns with opportunities to work with patients who represent various aspects of diversity, including age, religion, gender, disability status, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, values, and lifestyle.
Placing a high value on interns’ willingness to engage in self-reflection, and supporting the exploration of attitudes, beliefs and therapeutic postures that could impact clinical interactions.
Maintaining a consistent focus in clinical supervision on expanding interns’ multicultural awareness and competence in the provision of psychotherapeutic services and cultivating a sense of inclusion and belonging in the workplace.
Encouraging interns to participate in the Regional Mental Health Training Program Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee’s seminars related to cultural sensitivity and competence as their schedules permits.
Didactic Training
Interns will attend didactic seminars within their clinics and have opportunity to attend regional seminars organized by Mental Health Training Programs as their schedules permit. Didactics will cover a range of clinical and professional development topics as well as explore culturally responsive care. Interns will have access to both live and asynchronous exposure to various speakers and topics which are designed to meet their developmental needs over the course of the training year.
Seminars and Meetings
Interns may attend all-staff department meetings, treatment team meetings, and weekly feedback informed care case consultations.
Supervision
All interns are supervised by licensed mental health professionals who are responsible for overseeing the direct delivery of clinical services. The supervisor takes a role in developing the intern’s learning plan, monitoring their progress, and evaluating their training schedule. The supervisor is also responsible for completing the intern’s evaluation.
Interns will receive a minimum of one hour of individual supervision a week. Two hours of individual supervision will be provided for every 20 hours of service provision at minimum. Interns will also receive at least one hour of group supervision per week which may include case consultation, and topics related to professional development, interdisciplinary communication and systems issues, and multicultural competence and diversity awareness.
Tracks and Rotations
Eating Disorders
Pre-Masters interns will have the opportunity to learn specialty treatment of all diagnoses of eating disorders, participate in multi-disciplinary eating disorders clinics in pediatrics and adult & family medicine, co-facilitate groups in the eating disorder intensive out-patient program (EDIOP) and do community education and outreach on the prevention and treatment of eating disorders.
Schedule
Eating Disorder Track:
- M/W/Th 10-6:30 (M/Th in person at Mission Bay)
- T/F 9-5:30 hybrid telehealth and 939 Ellis Street
